


Zoey: You Have To

by writingforFUNandbecauseBoredom



Series: Pnat Apocalypse AU [7]
Category: Paranatural (Webcomic)
Genre: finally done, happy new year, oh my go
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 11:39:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17283380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writingforFUNandbecauseBoredom/pseuds/writingforFUNandbecauseBoredom
Summary: Zoey survives and grows up.There are thing she will never understand still.Things she is terrified of.But she has to try her best in these dire times.-----------THIS HERE IS MY NEW YEAR PRESENT FOR THE PARANATURALNOW FOR THE OTHER FANDOMS I AM A PART OF OH GOD





	Zoey: You Have To

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FountainPen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FountainPen/gifts), [syncro37](https://archiveofourown.org/users/syncro37/gifts).



You hated this. So much.

Your feet hurt from running around so much, and you feel like you’re about to faint.

You can’t remember the last time you took a bath, you want things to stop being scary, your brother has sometimes when he suddenly goes blank and stiff.

You hope your brother is okay. 

He won’t say anything, but you know that he wasn’t quite…human anymore.

At least it’s not a zombie apocalypse, yeah, there we go, some optimism.

It’s not like there is an infection going on, and you can die anytime-

‘Correction’, you think immediately, as a weird plant {spirit} jumps out of the ground, hissing and having a weird purple liquid drip down it’s maw. 

It’s teeth looked sharp too.

Before you can scream, or do something more embarrassing like peeing your pants, suddenly a metal snake emerges from among the scraps and bites down on the spirits, making it instantly ‘poof’ away.

“Zoey! Are you okay!”

‘I am the one most likely to die among them.’ 

Besides being a little girl, and not having the strength RJ, Ollie and Johnny has, or the brains Stephen and you big brother Max exhibit, you lack the most vital thing that could help you defend yourself.

You’re not a spectral. 

“…I’m fine….” 

You need to get the hang of this.

——————

You start to literally take notes of the spirits and the daily life you and your brother lead.

It wasn’t exactly a diary, more of a journal where you kept information on different types of spirits, the members of your group, and small trinkets you gather form here and there.

You also put in torn pages from some of the books you found left within in the Guerra house, books on symbols, spectral moves even if she wasn’t one, ancient symbols and possibly magic circles or some stuff. 

….And you might have ranted at it more than a few times which might have been a bad idea but hey! 

Important information is still stored here!!!

Soon, the information became useful. 

You were able to keep track of the days, find out exactly when certain spirits appeared, learned the time limit. 

You couldn’t fight against them, but you were able to help your brother set up traps for enemies. 

There is also notes on some of the gangs of humans we come across, there were some new spectral among them.

You felt more at ease, you kept track of valuable information, you contributed to this group as much as the others do now. 

You’re not useless.

You can make it.

———————

You remember how much fear you had felt when you were almost stabbed. 

Would you have become a ghost?

Would you have return as a poltergeist?

Or perhaps you would have left this world, fear of the pain it bought to you more powerful than the attachment you felt towards your brother.

Then right before the guy could get close to you one of the traps you had forgotten you even sat activated, piles of rocks tumbling down on the masked man one after another, even after getting him knocked out.

Max is standing there, the slits of his lower eyes seemingly opening slightly, and his upper eyes completely wide. The forming slits on his cheeks seemed to opening ajar slightly along with his mouth too.

“Zoey!”

He is immediately by your side, perhaps stepping on the person on purpose as he bounds to you, checking over your injuries.

You could feel his hands trembling, the fear in his eyes.

“….” He seemed to have gone back to mute, poking all over your body and watching carefully for your reactions, but you were fine and unharmed.

You cry a little, feeling slightly hysterical.

“I hehe set a trap here-ha-I didn’t even remember it was here!-but I’ve done good with those traps-haha-“ you’re hiccuping now.

He immediately pulls you close, his black aura flaring up protectively, tendrils of what looked like black mist going over debris and forming smaller versions of Scrapdragon.

“M’sorry!….m’sorry…!” 

You knew that you shouldn’t have left his side at a time like this.

You were only human. Weak. Vulnerable. 

You only had luck, a bit of navigational skills and inherited bits of parkour on your side.

Those weren’t enough.

They’re not enough.

You hide your face between his shoulder and neck as he hauls you up, your arms circling around his neck and your legs supported by his hands.

You can feel how uncomfortable that makes him. Max was subtly more aversive against touches ever since he had gotten back from the lab. All of you can understand why.

But he holds on, and keeps carrying you back.

_Please don’t disappear on me._

The action speaks louder than anything you had ever heard.

———————

Magic existed.

Lisa Jones takes a deep breath as you stand over Jeff’s grave, a person YOU didn’t knew well, but obviously everyone else had. 

You realize that the ones you can call friends-you-know-well are only PJ, Lefty(through association with PJ) and a couple of other spirits(through association with other spirits). Maybe you’re more anti-social than your brother is. You never made any friends during middle school, had you?

You’re in a world where everyone knows each other well, everyone that was standing around you just now, even the boy in the coffin, have made stories together.

And you? You don’t…have anything special enough. You’re not exactly helpful. To Max you will always be the most precious thing in the entire world maybe, but you’re not good enough are you?

Miss Lisa turns her face towards you and speaks.

“Do you want to learn a bit of magic?”

———————

You feel like the coolest person alive when you hold the wooden board in front of you, having finally gotten the correct symbols written on it and have chanted the correct incantation. 

You’ve positioned yourself right on the head of the ghost train, making sure you don’t fall off as the barrier you created rams into what is a corrupted spirit.

This isn’t the first time you had seen one. But this was the second time. And you had to wonder, as you felt like your hands were going to burn off, if there were other spirits as big as this.

———————

You want a lot of things. 

You want your dad to be alive, you want your big brother to be able to be his normal snarky brave self instead of this serious edgy leader. You want to meet your mom someday, even if she is a ghost. You want to meet her as a ghost. You want to be strong like the others are being. You want to stop being terrified. You want to learn magic, and use it. You want to feel like you add up to something, and you want to genuinely add up to something.

You want Max to stop looking hurt whenever you make a decision. You want your hands to stop hurting. You want Dr. Zarei and PJ to stop treating you like glass. 

Lisa, Cody, Violet and Lefty are the only ones that don’t treat you differently. Lisa was understandably angry at you for using magic you hadn’t practiced enough yet. Cody continued playing cards with you, though he had to help you pick a card up because of the state your hands are in, and continued being your silent friend. Violet braided your head a little, and told you tearful stories about her, Cody, Lisa and Jeff within the confines of her room, she needed a listening human ear and you were the one up for that job. Lefty and you keep spending time on the garden together, another silent companion.

…..

When Zarei finally removes the bandages, your hands are scarred.

Before you could feel bad about it Max shrugs his coat off when you are the only one in the room, revealing scars all over his arms.

“I, haven’t been able to tell you this, but you were brave out there Zoey. Really brave.”

The silent ‘But I was terrified.’ Wasn’t said, but you hear it clearly all the same.

You almost cry.

———————

You’re older when you meet the Jang again. 

Cody, Lisa and Violet had moved into the two peaks that once harbored Mayview, deciding to stay there when they went back to check for the first time after everything went down.

It was you, Max, Left, PJ and Zarei now.

You’re in awe of how much they have covered. The farming, works on transportation, building, alchemizing, and recruiting and law passing. 

It’s natural, you suppose. Max was only one leader, but Johnny ruled his people with four. 

You don’t miss the way Johnny looks at your big brother, the concern, the way he carefully treats him. The way he is much more calmer than he was before, jaded by years of forging, leading and thinking. 

You also don’t miss how he looks at your brother the same way Dad used to look at the picture of your mother, the same way Lisa and Violet looked at each other, and the same way you would catch Isaac sometimes looking at Max. 

You don’t think much of it. 

Not when Max’s focused on finding Isaac. 

Not when your brother needs to at least meet him once.

———————

You don’t like Isaac.

You don’t like how he bears his teeth, how he seems to keep all the rain clouds close to his mountain. All that water gone to waste.

With this sort of ability, Isaac could save the world. Isaac could do what nobody else can. 

But he chooses not to. 

He doesn’t listen to Max. 

They then go to somewhere more private, their respective spirits taking them to places where you will never reach.

You hear booming. Crackles of lightning. Metal screeching on metal. 

You see the blue flashes of thunder, the silhouette of a screeching Scrapdragon illuminated against the clouds.

And because you know there’s a story there that only the two of them can ever understand, you stay with PJ and lefty on the ground.

Max’s face was unreadable when he came back, when you finally beat PJ at tic-tac-toe.

———————

When you meet Isabel and Ed again, you found some sort of kinship.

All of you had stories now by the time the Time spirit plucked them from when the Guerra house burned down to when the world is…different.

You see their unease whenever Max walks into the same room as them, like they were seeing a stranger. And perhaps they were. The Max they knew was different after all.

The Max they knew…smiled more. You remember. 

It was silly watching how they interact now though, Max could be seen as this mystery uncle Isabel and Ed had never met before, that letted them ride on Scrapdragon sometimes.

You felt slightly like an older sister whenever she corrected on parts of the Ghost Train, and how the world works now, though you are the same age as they are.

You find yourself slightly curious whenever Ed interacts with RJ, who looks at him full of wonder and regret sometimes. You see a special bond there, lost in time, and perhaps it will be forever lost. 

You respectfully ignore how Ed cries after an interaction with RJ. You will never be able to understand the tragedy, you know, and you worry. But the way RJ smiles, as if a weight had gotten off from his chest, makes you believe everything will be okay.

You laugh when Isabel dramatically reacts to how Johnny had bulked up, and how she just as dramatically says how she needs to catch up. She keeps trying to fight him with her spectral energy, testing out some of the weapons Johnny makes. 

You feel terrified and protective by the time they meet Isaac, who looks down on them and states how it would be a bad idea for them to join the war against Corruption. You felt extremely angry when Max stops you from working your magic to stop the fight that immediately transpires after that.

“Let them make Isaac eat his own words.” 

You feel proud when they manage to drag Isaac to the ground, not missing how Max and Johnny beam a rare smile. 

———————

“Hey Zo’?”

“Yeah Izzy?”

“…Aren’t you annoyed by us?”

“Why would I be?”

“I mean, we’re the same age, it must be annoying that I don’t know the things-“

“You realize how stupid that sentence was about to be right?”

“…”

“…When all of this freak show started I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I made a lot of mistakes. I wasn’t a spectral and had no idea magic was a thing. I managed.”

“…”

“You’re learning much faster than I did. Max won’t tell you but he thinks you guys are doing very well.”

“Really? He said that? Max? He said that he guessed I was okay.”

“Pfft, that’s because he wants you to always be on alert and take this seriously, as you should! We’re going into war after all.”

“It’s strange how you’re calm about this.”

“I wish you could have meet the rest of the Puckett family. They’re worse than me.”

“Ha!”

“…”

“…”

“Hey Zoey?”

“Yes Isabel?”

“Thank you.”

———————

You works as support and healer while the others fight.

Constantly, you have to use magic constantly.

You don’t see much of how the battle goes, you only worry about whoever injured and heal them as best as you can as quickly as possible.

Violet joins in on helping you, and you feel hope bloom inside your chest as you see and hear the supernaturals join in on the fight against corrupted spirits.

Then you feel your stomach do a flip as you see something gigantic, much more gigantic than any other corrupted spirit you have seen loom over the battlefield.

———————

There was a flash.

There was a crack.

There roars of a battle cry.

You hear Isabel yell determined, angry, enraged.

You hear how Ed is shouting ‘NOW NOW NO-!’ As something red launches through the sky and right into the single eye of the Corruption King held back by Max, Johnny, and Isaac.

It was like watching the world die and become remade again.

You black out, thinking how such big red wings Isabel has.

———————

When you wake up again the war has been won.

There were burials, even for that one thing that came into Max to warn him of the King before decomposing and…unexisting? You don’t know how to explain it, other than the fact that it had been very creepy.

None the less, it had also helped them.

Lefty turned out to be the left hand of this vampiric guy. Who was also Cody and Lisa’s dad.

Welp. You were going to miss your gardening buddy.

And Max and Johnny seem to have become married?….

It didn’t matter anymore though, the war had been one.

All of you can work on writing it into history later. 

Rebuilding comes first.

———————

Your name is Zoey Puckett. 

You leave in a household with a ghost, and five humans with supernatural abilities. You were a magic user that ran a medical shop with Violet, your boss.

Ed and Isabel are your nieces now, as Max had adopted them along with Johnny right after the marriage. 

Isaac started to live here as well, occasionally flying to the mountain before returning. 

Cody was dealing with being the Fourth leader now, and lived separately, stating that he had found a werewolf boyfriend. They were close by in another apartment. You snickered whenever Lisa and Davy silently threatened the poor wolf despite Cody’s insistence. 

There were a lot of issues all of you still had. 

But for now, the only big drama that caught your eye was how Isaac, Johnny and Max shared looks between each other.

You love how being a little sister gives you the power to tease. 

 

————————

END


End file.
